Sculpture

Je voulus voir si les races vivantes m'offriraient plus de vertus ou moins de malheurs que les races évanouies. Comme je me promenais un jour dans une grande cité, en passant derrière un palais, dans une cour retirée et déserte, j'aperçus une statue qui indiquait du doigt un lieu fameux par un sacrifice. Je fus frappé du silence de ces lieux ; le vent seul gémissait autour du marbre tragique. Des manœuvres étaient couchés avec indifférence au pied de la statue ou taillaient des pierres en sifflant. Je leur demandai ce que signifiait ce monument : les uns purent à peine me le dire, les autres ignoraient la catastrophe qu'il retraçait. Rien ne m'a plus donné la juste mesure des événements de la vie et du peu que nous sommes. Que sont devenus ces personnages qui firent tant de bruit ? Le temps a fait un pas, et la face de la terre a été renouvelée.

I wished to see if the living races would offer me more virtues or less misfortunes than the vanished ones. As I was strolling one day through a great city, while passing behind a palace, in a secluded and deserted courtyard, I noticed a statue that indicated with its finger a place famous for a sacrifice. I was struck by the silence of the surroundings; only the wind moaned around the tragic marble. Some labourers were lying indifferently at the base of the statue, chipping stones and whistling. I asked them what this monument signified: some could hardly tell me, others had not heard of the catastrophe it recorded. Nothing has given me a juster measure of the events of life and of the little that we are. What has become of these personages who made so much noise? Time takes just a step, and the face of the earth has been renewed.

(from Chateaubriand's René (1802). Complete text: https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9 .)

A note in my copy says:

A Londres, derrière White-Hall, la statue de Charles II.

In fact, Chateaubriand must have seen the 1686 statue of James II by Peter Van Dievoet and Laurence Vandermeulen (workshop of Grinling Gibbons), now outside the National Gallery but then in the Pebble Court just off the Privy Gardens of the Palace of Whitehall. We can imagine his fictional narrator René as having seen it a few years before his arrival in Louisiana in 1725 (this date comes from the earlier story Atala).

The monarch, in classical garb, originally carried a baton in his right hand. The baton was still there in 1790, then disappeared for a few years (if early 19th-century engravings can be trusted), then reappeared and now seems to be lost for good. But with or without baton, James does seem to be pointing to the ground (a gesture that puzzled some critics at the time).

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

Chateaubriand drew the conclusion that the statue was indicating the place where James's father had been "sacrificed" in 1649. Which was indeed at Whitehall, outside the Banqueting House.

I'm not sure if anyone else thought this, or whether Chateaubriand had transferred the idea from another statue that is very definitely a pointing finger, metaphorically speaking.

This is the equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross. Horse and rider were positioned to look towards Whitehall, as if triumphing over the rider's future fate.

Yet the statue dates from Charles I's own lifetime. It was made by Hubert Le Sueur in 1630-33 for Richard Weston , Lord High Treasurer, for his house in Roehampton, Surrey. During the Commonwealth the statue was supposed to have been melted down, but someone was canny enough to deceive the authorities. After the restoration it was purchased by Charles II and placed in its current significant position, on an elevated plinth.

[Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/locosteve/42239649752 . Photo by Loco Steve.]

I was so sensitively aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished, that for some time I could not make up my mind to pass her at all, under the ignoble circumstances of the case; but, hearing her there with a broom, stood peeping out of window at King Charles on horseback, surrounded by a maze of hackney-coaches, and looking anything but regal in a drizzling rain and a dark-brown fog ...

(David Copperfield, Ch. 20: young David shy of the chambermaid at the Golden Cross Inn.)

Apart from its motion towards Whitehall, the statue's placement in Charing Cross had additional meaning. It was here that eight of the regicides were executed in 1660, six months after Charles II's return.

And monumental sculpture was itself a statement. In 1643 the Parliamentarians had passed the Bill "An Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry", which led to the destruction, four years later, of the medieval Eleanor Cross that gave Charing Cross its name.

Public sculpture, then as now, was highly contested. For Chateaubriand, Romantic, Royalist and Catholic, the destruction, decay and neglect of old sculptures could only be a subject for melancholy.

Quelquefois une haute colonne se montrait seule debout dans un désert, comme une grande pensée s'élève, par intervalles, dans une âme que le temps et le malheur ont dévastée.

Shelley, sixteen years later, didn't see it quite the same way.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

For I take "Ozymandias" to be a revolutionary poem.

The difficult 8th line provokes the question, whose hand and whose heart? The two most common interpretations are A. The hand and heart are both Ozymandias'. B. The hand is the sculptor's and the heart is Ozymandias'. I take A to be impossible, as it requires "them" to mean the tyrant's subjects, but the poem has not mentioned the subjects. B is possible, taking "them" to mean Ozymandias' passions; but it's awkward to have the first half of the line talk about the sculptor and the second half about Ozymandias. And to say that the sculptor's delineation survives his and Ozymandias' lives is to say what is hardly very remarkable.

The remarkable thing, evidently, is that the sculptor's delineation survives even the destruction of the colossus. So my theory (though surely I'm not the first to think it) is that line 8 refers to the unnamed agent of the destruction. It's this agent's hand that mocks "them" (meaning the "lifeless things", the fragments of the colossus); it's this agent's heart that is fed by the act of demolition.

And who was this agent? Shelley is being obliquely discreet. Perhaps, with reference to Prometheus Unbound, we might call it Demogorgon.  As in that poem, it's possible to conceive the nemesis of tyranny as simply the grand passage of Time or the processes of Nature. But it's also possible, as Paul Foot argued in Red Shelley, to conceive Demogorgon as the spirit of revolution, and the poem as a call to action.

The Younger Memnon (Ramesses II) in the British Museum

[Image source: Wikipedia . This is the colossal figure, then being transported to Britain, that inspired the composition of "Ozymandias". Shelley had heard about it but he never saw it.]

[Since writing this, I've come to question my own reading. The little word "yet", in line 7, could perhaps take the weight of remarkableness. And I sense a pejorative tone in "the heart that fed", perhaps more appropriate to the original tyrant than the later agent of demolition.]

Meaning wears constantly away; nothing on this earth is supposed to last forever, the process of change is what allows new life to be lived. A statue, like the mortal it figures, has decay encoded in it. Now and then people want change so badly that they smash the plates.

Chateaubriand's rivers

François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1790. Portrait by Anne-Louis Girodet

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Ren%C3%A9_de_Chateaubriand#/media/File:Fran%C3%A7ois-Ren%C3%A9_de_Chateaubriand_by_Anne-Louis_Girodet_de_Roucy_Trioson.jpg . Portrait from around the time of Chateaubriand's travels in America.]




On the first page of Atala (1801), Chateaubriand describes the once-enormous colony of Nouvelle-France:





La France possédait autrefois, dans l'Amérique septentrionale, un vaste empire qui s'étendait depuis de Labrador jusqu'aux Florides, et depuis les rivages de l'Atlantique jusqu'aux lacs les plus reculés du haut Canada.



Quatres grands fleuves, ayant leur sources dans les même montagnes, divisaient ces régions immenses : le fleuve Saint-Laurent qui se perd à l'est dans let golfe de son nom, la rivière de l'Ouest qui porte ses eaux à des mers inconnues, le fleuve Bourbon qui se précipite du midi au nord dans la baie d'Hudson, et la Meschacebé qui tombe du nord au midi, dans le golfe du Mexique.




[At one time France possessed, in North* America, a vast empire that extended from Labrador to the Floridas, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the remotest lakes of upper Canada.


Four great rivers, having their sources in the same mountains, divided these immense regions: the St Lawrence which debouches to the east in the Gulf of the same name; the river of the West which carries its waters into unknown seas, the Bourbon river which drains from south to north into Hudson Bay, and the Meschacebé which runs from north to south, into the gulf of Mexico.]




*




* l'Amérique septentrionale. "Septentrional" means northern or boreal; its derivation is from the seven stars of Ursa Major/The Plough/Big Dipper. A fairly rare word in English, but common in romance languages. Shakespeare uses it:

Thou art as opposite to every good
As the Antipodes are unto us,
Or as the south to the Septentrion.

(York to Margaret, 3H6 1.4)


*






Chateaubriand  pauses to explain that the last of these four rivers is the Mississippi, the opening scene of his romance.



The St Lawrence retains its name today. The "fleuve Bourbon" evidently means the Nelson River, which drains so much of Canada and the northern USA ; York Factory, at its mouth on Hudson Bay, was once named Fort Bourbon.



The "rivière de l'Ouest" completes the geographical symmetry. The only possible candidate would be the river now named the McKenzie River, which drains a large part of northern Canada into the NW Arctic Ocean. The Vicomte did know about it; he reviewed Alexander McKenzie's travel journals on their first publication in  July 1801, three months after the publication of Atala. But so far as the maps show, Nouvelle-France had never extended so far into north-west Canada as to reach the McKenzie basin.



But anyway, Chateaubriand was never too constrained by reality. What he wanted to suggest here was the four rivers of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:10-14). [This idea seems to be buried deep in the religious feelings of humanity. The holy Mount Kailash in Tibet guards the headwaters to four great Asian rivers (the Indus, Sutlej, Bramahputra and Ganghara/Ganges).]  In his Atala Nouvelle-France is indeed a kind of Eden, with a dazzling profusion of nature and its own beautiful but too-innocent Adam and Eve.


[Readers of Martin Chuzzlewit may see the association of the mid-west with Eden in an altogether different light.]




In reality, the nearest we can come to Chateaubriand's mythical central mountains is the small city of Hibbing in St Louis County, Minnesota, founded in 1893, 45 years after Chateaubriand's death. Though at the modest elevation of 1,500 feet, it's a triple watershed,  so the rain that falls on  Hibbing runs variously into Hudson Bay, the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico.











The spirit of Chateaubriand's emphasis on rivers is right. The largely inland "empire" of Nouvelle-France, which surrounded the much smaller British colonies along the eastern seaboard, was the product of river-exploration. This opened up immense tracts of land to French control. But the control was more on the map than in reality. The total population of French emigrants was barely 10,000. They had, comparatively speaking, very good relations with the native Americans (who were encouraged to apply for French citizenship, on equal terms with native French); compared, that is, with the brutal attitudes of the British and Spanish colonists. I suppose a cynic might argue that the French colonists were respectful more through force of circumstance than their own enlightened attitudes.




At first the battle for control was a proxy war: the Iroquois, fur suppliers to British and Dutch colonies, seeking to wipe out the Algonquians, Hurons and others who traded with France. And when direct conflict came, in 1754-63, Nouvelle-France couldn't hold out against the much more populous colonies of the British. In the course of fifty years the whole "empire" was lost or ceded, the only remnant today being the tiny islands of St Pierre-Miquelon, just off the Newfoundland coast.